http://www.commonagency.com Just another WordPress weblog Tue, 24 Aug 2010 21:00:21 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Following on from my recent steps into optimising video for the iPhone and iPad, I have to recommend Vimeo Plus as a far preferable option over YouTube in terms of painlessly making video available to mobile devices. The $60/year for Vimeo Plus, besides other benefits such as advanced embed options, ... http://www.commonagency.com/feed/2010/08/vimeo-plus-for-mobile-video/ As we all know, Adobe and Apple aren't best buddies, so Flash isn't appearing on the iPhone/iPad any time soon. In fact, probably never. Therefore, with Flash being the king of video on the web, there's only one option for showing video in the browser to iPhone and iPad users: ... http://www.commonagency.com/feed/2010/07/html5-video-in-safari-for-iphone-and-ipad/ Whilst iPhone, Android and other rich devices continually raise the bar for the high-end mobile experience, it would be easy to overlook the persistent innovation and advance in low-end technologies such as SMS. Common have delivered a number of services which have relied heavily on SMS and we've usually been ... http://www.commonagency.com/feed/2010/07/the-internet-by-sms/ OK, so I can't guarantee that the Tweenies themselves could use this Tweener Documentation and Language Reference, but if like me you have only occasional need to use tweening functions and each time end-up going through a trial and error scenario of "what's the difference between bounce out and ease ... http://www.commonagency.com/feed/2010/06/tweening-for-tweenies/ Browser testing, or QA as technical people call it to clients, or indeed "total bane of my life" as they call it to each other, is a necessary evil of web development these days. As ever, I've been looking at streamlining this part of our development and delivery process, and ... http://www.commonagency.com/feed/2010/06/browser-testing/ Not a blog title I ever expected to write but I love the look of this Augmented Reality app this AR iPhone app and can see it being a big hit in Japan with it's quirky but cute mass-user game approach. I think AR is still being mainly used just ... http://www.commonagency.com/feed/2010/06/augmented-reality-butterfly-catching/ I'm not exactly the first to notice, nor (obviously) am I involved in any way, but it's hard not to be inspired by the Wired article about how Pixar built Toy Story 3. From the story itself through to the presentation of the article on the Wired site, it just ... http://www.commonagency.com/feed/2010/06/pixar-rock/ Maybe there are already lots of 3rd party software/website testing companies out there, but if so then I've not come across them. Therefore, when The Crowd/Software Testing Club started following me on Twitter I thought it worthy of a mention. It seems an obvious idea - a network of skilled ... http://www.commonagency.com/feed/2010/06/testing-times/ Ever wanted to use the semantically correct HTML SUP tag for superscript but not been able to get the styling right? Well if you thought you'd "just fix it during lunch-break" like I just did, but ended up still fint-tuning the presentation an hour later, have a look at this ... http://www.commonagency.com/feed/2010/06/styling-supercsript-in-css/ We're looking forward to the forthcoming release of Wordpress 3.0. Continuing the excellent evolution path from blogging system to middleweight CMS, from a developer perspective it's great to see that version 3.0 ignores some of the often requested improvements such as media management and focuses on fixing some of the ... http://www.commonagency.com/feed/2010/05/wordpress-3/ Some interesting examples of how CSS3 could be used to create nicer looking (possibly more cross-OS consistent?) buttons. Firstly this blog goes into some detail about the process and then the idea is also taken up and  simplified by others. I think the best part about this is it shows ... http://www.commonagency.com/feed/2010/05/css3-buttons/ This HTML5 presentation is an easy to understand and exciting introduction to sensibly applied HTML5 techniques. Obviously there's little point in viewing it in anything other than Chrome or Safari, or possibly Firefox 3.6, but if you can see it all then it offers a great demonstration of modern ... http://www.commonagency.com/feed/2010/05/html5-features-presentation/ Seeing as the website for Microsoft's new social focussed mobile - the "Kin" - is very media rich, you might have assumed it would be delivered using Silverlight, Microsoft's own rich media technology. It's a bit surprising therefore to find that it's a Flash site. Surely there must be an ... http://www.commonagency.com/feed/2010/04/the-kin-snubs-its-kin/ Though Apple's iWorks is generally a great Office suite to work with, one of the most annoying workflow issues is it's requirement to always save files as .pages/.key e.g. if you open a Word document then you can't just save it, you have to always "Save as...". It turns out ... http://www.commonagency.com/feed/2010/04/working-with-doc-and-ppt-in-iworks/ I've just recently been tipped off about this CSS3 generator site and having had a chance to play around with it I've found it a very compelling way of trying out CSS3 effects. CSS values can be edited and are applied in real-time for as live preview of how the ... http://www.commonagency.com/feed/2010/03/pleasing-css3-rule-generator/ I'm all for standard approaches to interface design and conforming to best practice and UI guidelines, but let's face it, you don't very often create magical interfaces that way. However, most of the application designs over at Well-Placed Pixels feel much more likely to catch your breath, whether by pixel-perfect ... http://www.commonagency.com/feed/2010/03/beautiful-application-design/ It seems finally it's cool to be a mobile specialist. Or at least if not cool then certainly in demand. I knew there was a reason why we stuck at it! NMA's article refers to how difficult it can be for a traditional media agency to understand mobile, stating that some ... http://www.commonagency.com/feed/2010/03/nows-the-time-to-be-a-mobile-specialist/ Adobe makes a move to bolster Flash's ailing position in the mobile arena by announcing that Flash 10.1 and AIR will be launched onto Android devices in the middle of 2010. So what with the promise of exporting Flash to iPhone apps (from Flash CS5) and being able to export ... http://www.commonagency.com/feed/2010/02/flash-player-and-air-for-android/ With such a mammoth audience, Facebook are probably one of the few to be able to shake Google's dominance in the online advertising market and some of their recent changes are focused on tackling Google Head-On. From an advertisers perspective, with potentially greater or more obvious targeting potential in some ... http://www.commonagency.com/feed/2010/02/facebook-going-after-google-advertising-revenue/ Google seem to be all about continual iteration and roll-out of small new features these days. Whether it's visual tweaks to make the search box more obvious on their homepage, helping computers understand language or adding subtle intelligent enhancements to the search results. In the latter case, searching for "empire ... http://www.commonagency.com/feed/2010/01/intelligent-highlighting-in-search-results/